Interviews
‘There’s Something Wrong With the Children’ – Roxanne Benjamin Talks Evil Kid Subversion and Script Changes [Interview]
Up next from the ongoing collaboration between Blumhouse and EPIX is There’s Something Wrong with the Children, directed by Roxanne Benjamin (V/H/S, Southbound) and coming to Digital and On Demand outlets on Tuesday, January 17, 2023.
Benjamin’s new movie will later be hitting MGM+ on March 17, 2023.
In the film, Margaret (Alisha Wainwright) and Ben (Zach Gilford) take a weekend trip with friends Ellie (Amanda Crew) and Thomas (Carlos Santos) and their two young children. Ben begins to suspect something sinister is afoot when the kids behave strangely after disappearing into the woods overnight. If only anyone would believe him.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with Roxanne Benjamin about her latest, where she broke down the script changes, influences, and whether being entrenched in horror makes it easier or more challenging to subvert expectations in a familiar subgenre.
For starters, There’s Something Wrong with the Children opens with a stylish title sequence, which Benjamin attributes primarily to her love of Stephen King.
When asked about the title card and overall influences, the filmmaker answered, “Just across the board, Stephen King, and for the aesthetic of the titles when they pop up. But for the slow-mo running around stuff that happens at the beginning with the Sisters of Mercy song; that’s all What Have You Done to Solange?, where she’s riding around on the bike. It’s all in orange, and green was such a big color for this movie for me. Between the woods, the kids, their eyes, and all the stuff that happens using that color was very much a thematic thing for me. So, washing everything in that color in the beginning and showing the kids seemingly innocent throughout that title sequence was a fun thing that they let me get away with.”
The film takes place within the neighboring cabins and surrounding woods, but nearby ruins provide a source of horror. It turns out that the ruins weren’t initially part of the script but a necessary change from a production standpoint, as Benjamin explained to us.
The filmmaker chronicled the changes, “It didn’t start as them finding an old building. It’s them coming upon a big vista and a ravine. The movie was called The Ravine, and that’s what it was in the script, but Louisiana’s a delta, so no ravines in Louisiana, where Blumhouse shoots the series. That was a big change from the script where it was like, ‘What do we make this then since there isn’t that?’ The largest peak in Louisiana is right up by the border, and I think it’s 600 feet.
“We couldn’t go that far. We couldn’t go more than 30 minutes from New Orleans. So, one thing they have around there are these old forts. Fort McComb is one that’s been used in actually a lot of horror movies. But I shot it to disguise what it was and maybe make it seem a little bit different than we had seen it before in other horror movies. The stonework that leads up to the edge of the big hole into the earth is all built, and then the whole ridge around it is all built too. Then the rest of it is all green screen and VFX. It was trying to find something that would suit the story needs, but also that was available to us.“
Did the shift from ravine to ruins alter any of the story’s mythology?
“I think I had to change a lot of the mythology because of it being this pit and it being ruins throughout the story, to fit within that and what was happening with the kids. It was all DNA that was in the script. It was just tweaking it to fit with what we had, which usually happens in production anyway,” Benjamin detailed. “Then also, the way it was written, it’s written to a specific type of location in that houses were farther apart through the woods. There was a lake in the script. There are a bunch of different scenes that happened in the car. There was no garage. It’s all stuff that we had to figure out with what we had.
“This fit that bill, and I think it worked out to our advantage because both the houses are within complete view of each other, and there’s one shared yard between them. I think that helped us out and helped the story out a bit. I had a cabin I went to all the time growing up where my uncle and my family were always, and it was my uncle’s cabin. They had The Far Side driftwood sign above it. I worked that into the story too. The Far Side is the one cabin, then the other; I don’t know if you see it on there, but it says, ‘The Farther Side.’ It’s just a really dumb dad joke that I find hilarious. I try to work those into my horror movies.“
Benjamin’s latest suggests a conventional evil child horror movie, but it winds up subverting the formula through perspective shifts and unique mythology. Benjamin reflected when asked if working in the genre space and being a fan for so long makes it easier or more challenging to surprise fellow horror fans.
“I don’t know,” she answered, “That’s a really good question. Most evil kid movies are trying to solve the problem, which this one doesn’t do. Or it’s just a full gaslighting of, usually, the female character who’s dealing with this specific situation. It always feels like a supernatural entity that’s trying to be solved. A lot of them, even going from evil kid movies into teenage girl possession movies, always focuses on, ‘What do we do about this?’ in a way that this one doesn’t.
“It’s almost like it’s its own thing where it’s not trying to do anything about it so much. By the time you realize, ‘oh shit, he’s right,’ it’s too late. Then we’re just into, How do we get out of here? How do we get away from this with our lives?
“I’m a big fan of Village of the Damned, but that one’s obviously very much spelled out. And The Good Son. The Good Son’s a better one to think of in terms of this because you’ve got one character who sees someone for who they are, and no one else sees it, and no one else believes them until it’s too late. That’s a similar DNA. But knowing so much horror helps in terms of knowing what’s come before. Are you paying homage to any parts of that, or are you trying to subvert any part of that? The things I’m trying to subvert are just the gaslighting of the female character being flipped on its head. That’s the main one.”
Interviews
‘The Death of Robin Hood’ Director Michael Sarnoski on Brutal Violence and Reinventing the Legend
Michael Sarnoski (A Quiet Place: Day One, Pig) gives a darker spin on a classic ballad in The Death of Robin Hood, which sees a legendary outlaw confront his own violent legacy.
A24 releases the dark reimagining of the classic folk tale in theaters this Friday, June 19.
Hugh Jackman stars as a grizzled Robin Hood, who begins Sarnoski’s latest in a grim place of death and violence before a grave injury presents a rare chance at salvation.
In 13th-century grit and squalor, the violence in The Death of Robin Hood is especially brutal, setting up a stark contrast for the outlaw’s thematic journey in his final days. Speaking with Bloody Disgusting ahead of the film’s release, writer-director Michael Sarnoski explained that the visceral brutality at the film’s outset was both a reflection of period authenticity and in service of Robin’s story.
“It’s always a little bit of both,” Sarnoski explains. “The initial idea for the movie was I wanted to humanize these characters from this old legend and really understand them. So, part of that is understanding the authenticity of the period and studying the brutality of the old ballads. Both things evolved at the same time, because then it became this story about this person who was grappling with their own legacy of violence and their own folklore.”
Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/A24
He continues, “It was a little bit of a chicken and the egg thing where it was like, ‘Okay, the authenticity is where we’re going to access the humanity.’ But then, through that, we also have to access how these people felt about that violence. And because of that, we really have to make that violence feel human and real and brutal and not Hollywood-ized at all.“
But don’t expect The Death of Robin Hood to be too beholden to period accuracy; the filmmaker never wanted to lose sight of its characters or their humanity. “I was more trying to capture, in my mind and soul, what it might have felt like to live at that time. When you’re steeped in nature and all of its brutality, but also all of its divinity and spirituality, what would that just feel like on a deeper soul level? A lot of the research was focused on just trying to capture that human side of existing back then.”
The Death of Robin Hood avoids retreading the familiar origin story of the outlaw and his Merry Men; the past is a distant memory steeped in blood for this iteration of Robin Hood. Save for Little John (Bill Skarsgård), very little calls back to the familiar folklore fixtures and iconography.
“It wasn’t straightforward,” Sarnoski says of his writing process and choosing which characters to incorporate. “It kind of happened organically. I knew I just wanted the pieces that I needed for that character, but then at the same time, I wanted to acknowledge that he’s grappling with what he believes his life was, and the violence of that life and of that time. But then at the same time, he’s also not a fully reliable narrator. He has been jaded for decades and has just been steeped in that violence. Even he and Little John especially aren’t 100% sure which of these things were stories and which were real in some way, because I think even in our own lives we have that, where our memories become these stories that we just tell each other.”
“I wanted to make sure that we’re doing some justice to that Robin Hood legend, and there are a lot of references to that. I wanted to use it sparingly and specifically, but then also acknowledge that no one in this world is 100% sure who this guy was, not even the guy himself.”
Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/A24
While Jackman commands the screen as the world-weary outlaw, it’s Murray Bartlett (“The Last of Us”, Opus) who steals scenes as the enigmatic leper standing vigil over the Priory.
Bartlett’s complex performance, buried under unrecognizable costuming and prosthetics, surprised even Sarnoski in more ways than one. “The initial surprise was finding such a great actor who was willing to completely disappear. And that takes a lot of ego death and bravery and excitement for the pure creative, emotional side, and also bravery in the performance side of, ‘You’re not going to have 90% of the tools that you usually use. You’re going to have to do this with your eyes, your voice, and just your physicality.’ So, I think just the surprise of finding someone who was like that was the feature, not the bug. He was so excited about that, and he found it very liberating.
“Then, it sounds kind of obvious, but the next surprise was just you write this character on the page, and you’re like, ‘Okay, he’s supposed to have this depth, he’s mysterious, but he’s also gentle, and he becomes this almost teacher.’ In your mind, you’re like, ‘Okay, I think this character can work.’ But then you see Murray embody it and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is so far beyond what I ever could have hoped for.’ And it’s so moving and so human in spite of all the limitations on the performance.”
Sarnoski notes this character acts as the ferryman, right on the cusp of life and death. That, along with the period, also informed the Leper’s look, “In those old monasteries, they had these orchard cemeteries that were also where they buried the body. It’s this place of graves and growth. He has subtly different outfits that he wears depending on if he’s ferryman or orchardman. There was a lot of thought that went into all of that.”
Credit: Aidan Monagha
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